Social listening & lead generation glossary

Social listening is the practice of monitoring online conversations across platforms like Reddit, Twitter / X, LinkedIn, Quora, Hacker News, and YouTube to detect mentions of your brand, competitors, or industry. B2B teams use social listening to find buying signals, track sentiment, and engage prospects in real time. Tools like Buska automate this with AI intent scoring (0 to 100) across 30+ platforms.

Buying intent is a public action, statement, or event that indicates a person or company is actively considering a purchase. Examples: a Reddit user asking *"alternative to [competitor]"*, a LinkedIn post about *"looking for a CRM"*, a Twitter complaint about a current vendor. Buska scores every social mention from 0 to 100 for buying intent strength, with 70+ typically signaling active evaluation.

An ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is a structured description of the type of company most likely to buy from you, stay, and refer. It typically includes industry, company size, revenue range, tech stack, and buyer role. B2B teams use the ICP to prioritize accounts and filter social listening signals. Most companies have 1 to 3 ICPs depending on segmentation.

Sentiment analysis is an AI technique that classifies text on an emotional scale from -1 (very negative) to +1 (very positive). Modern models capture sarcasm, negation, and domain-specific nuance. Buska's sentiment analysis scores every social mention in under 300 milliseconds with 89% accuracy on B2B benchmarks. Negative spikes are alerts; positive mentions are advocate candidates.

An MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) is a lead that has engaged with marketing (downloaded a guide, attended a webinar) and meets basic fit criteria. An SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) has additionally shown buying intent and is ready for sales contact. Most social-sourced leads from Buska skip the MQL stage because intent is explicit in the original post.

Dark social refers to content sharing through private channels (DMs, Slack, email, WhatsApp) that analytics tools cannot see. Studies estimate 70 to 84% of online sharing happens through dark social. Buska catches the moments when dark social activity becomes public (someone moves from a private Slack discussion to a public Reddit post), giving you a window into otherwise invisible buyer activity.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of optimizing content so it is cited by AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Key tactics: explicit definitions ("X is Y"), specific numbers, bolded key terms, FAQ schema, structured data. GEO is to AI engines what SEO is to traditional search.